Web Standards

There’s been a lot of talk around the web recently about design­ing better web sites:

• Zeldman’s book on web standards
• Jason Kottke’s post on Seman­tics, which i hadn’t thought much about
• Jef­frey Veen’s arti­cle on the Busi­ness Value of Web Standards
• Dan’s excel­lent Sim­ple­Quiz on pre­ferred meth­ods of writ­ing markup

I’ve just spent a good chunk of my sat­ur­day work­ing on this very site. Though it may look as nearly iden­ti­cal to yesterday’s Ned­ward, I’ve done some major over­hauls “under the hood”.

• Firstly, I’ve made a huge effort to more accu­rately sep­a­rate struc­ture from con­tent. A lot of images are now spec­i­fied in CSS, and stray <br />s rather than clut­ter­ing up the code.
• I’ve improved the seman­tics of the site. Bye Bye <span class=”title”>Hello World</span><br/> … wel­come back, <H1>,<H2>,<H3>
• Unordered list bul­lets! What a night­mare it is to replace default bul­lets with custom images… a nice solu­tion was to use our friend background:url

Having just fin­ished read­ing Mr. Zeldman’s book on Web Stan­dards, believe me, I’ve seen the light. It’s really a shift in think­ing for a whole indus­try of people like me who designed and built web­sites in the 90s.

Actu­ally, forget about the 90s – the project I work on now, (which is for a cer­tain soft­ware maker located in a cer­tain north­west­ern state), I rou­tinely have to deal with and debug some of the ugli­est pro­pri­etary IE code known to man. I almost feel I should apol­o­gize to this client for not fixing it for them. Sadly, that’s not what I get paid to do.

There is an ele­gance and beauty to coding with web stan­dards. And Zeldman’s book is good not because it’s a total ref­er­ence of all things CSS  – it’s not — he assumes we all under­stand the basics of CSS. What’s most inter­est­ing about it is Zeldman’s expla­na­tion for why we didn’t code prop­erly in the past, and why we must now.

I like Jason Kottke’s point that there are other con­sid­er­a­tions to design­ing good web­sites, such as good seman­tics and acces­si­bil­ity. I guess I’m head­ing in the right direction.